Reflections, commentaries, critiques and ideas from 40 years experience in the fields of Community Development, Community Education and Social Justice. Useful tools and techniques that I have learnt also added occassionally.

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The name of this blog, Rainbow Juice, is intentional.The rainbow signifies unity from diversity. It is holistic. The arch suggests the idea of looking at the over-arching concepts: the big picture. To create a rainbow requires air, fire (the sun) and water (raindrops) and us to see it from the earth.Juice suggests an extract; hence rainbow juice is extracting the elements from the rainbow, translating them and making them accessible to us. Juice also refreshes us and here it symbolises our nutritional quest for understanding, compassion and enlightenment.

Tuesday, 20 June 2017

Two Faces of Empathy

Empathy – the ability to understand and to feel the emotional state of
another. Sounds like a helpful state to be in doesn’t it? Perhaps it is,
perhaps it isn’t.

Empathy can lead towards healthy states of understanding – except when it
doesn’t. Sometimes it can lead towards aggression and even violence. “What?” I
hear the cries. “How can empathy lead towards violence? Surely stepping into
the shoes of another leads us to understanding their situation more clearly and
hence to trust them as if they were ourselves?” Yes, I can hear those questions
of doubt. I had them too until I came across some research that suggests that
empathy can, indeed, create harm.

The conundrum arises when the person whose shoes we are stepping into is a
victim. With an empathy for that person we can come to identify with them and
their pain so much that we want to right the wrong, perhaps even to the
point of inflicting violence on the perpetrator.

History abounds with instances of empathy dissolving into righteous anger and
violence against perceived perpetrators of oppression, exploitation, or simply
disregard of another. When the invasion of Iraq was being planned, one of the
methods used to get support for the invasion was stories of the abuses committed
by Saddam Hussein and his sons. We empathised with the victims and became
complicit in the invasion of Iraq as a a result of our empathy.

Our criminal justice systems are awash with this phenomenon. A young man
punches another in a drunken brawl on a Saturday night, the victim sustaining
broken teeth and a fractured jaw. Our empathy for the victim leads us to
wanting the offender to be locked up and punished because of the compassion we
now have for the victim.

Our compassion in each of these examples leads us to aggression and violence
(of varying degrees) towards the perpetrator of the abuse. The justification
for such aggression can be argued back and forth, and I do not intend discussing
that here. What I do want to point to is that our empathy can become so
attached to a victim that we may even wish an aggressive response towards
someone who is not the perpetrator – even towards someone who is removed from
the situation. This is the research carried out by Anneke Buffone and Michael
Poulin and reported in the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin.1
In their research Buffone and Poulin told experiment participants that two
(fictional) strangers were to take a test that if they won would give them a
financial reward, whereas the other would receive nothing. The participants in
the study pre-read an essay by one of the two fictional competitors in which
they talked about the financial and other hardships they were experiencing. One
half of the participants read an essay in which the concluding remarks were
fearful with the fictional person wondering “What if I need to pay for something
else I didn’t expect?” The other half read the same essay except that the
concluding remarks were hopeful and claimed “I’m pretty sure things will get
better soon.” The participants then had the opportunity to administer pain (by
way of getting the fictional competitor to eat hot sauce) on this person’s
competitor, should they wish to do so. The researchers discovered that
participants were likely to administer the ‘hot sauce’ treatment to the
competitor of the person experiencing financial hardship – even though that
person had no relationship with the other and had nothing to do with the
supposed hardship of the other. The likelihood of the participants
administering the ‘hot sauce’ was increased in the case where the essay
concluded on a fearful note.

This research suggests that our empathy can lead us towards an aggressive
response towards someone unassociated with a victim. Thus, our compassion for a
victim could lead towards creating further victims. We see this occurring too.
The current anti-Muslim crusade in the wake of terrorist attacks is a highly
visible one. Muslim people are becoming victimised, even though they have
nothing to do with the perpetrators of terrorism.

So, what to do about empathy? The first thing we can do is to understand
that everything is connected and that there cannot be a single pathway towards
social justice. Empathy is not a single pathway. Many centuries before Buffone
and Poulin carried out their research the difficulty of working with empathy on
its own had been given consideration by Zen Buddhist monks. Within that
practice there is a saying that “For the bird of enlightenment to fly, it
must have two wings: the wing of wisdom and the wing of compassion.”
Acting only from a sense of compassion, fuelled by our empathy, we can easily
lose ourselves in aggression, a desire for retribution or even violence. We
need to fly with both wings. The wing of wisdom allows us to bring a full
understanding to events and situations. Wisdom allows us to see the big
picture, to recognise the inter-connections, to appreciate our common humanity.
Yet, wisdom alone can become dispassionate, detached or aloof. Traditional
western thinking separates compassion and wisdom, the former being consigned to
emotional states and the latter primarily of an intellectual nature. Eastern
psychology (as exemplified in the Zen saying) recognises that the two “wings”
are required to allow us to fly.

When we fly in such a way we do so with grace and purpose. We fly with
greater awareness. Notes:

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About Me

I have almost 40 years experience working (paid and unpaid, government and non-government) in community development/education and social justice fields. I have continued to keep myself abreast of philosophies and theories in these and related fields. This blogsite will offer ideas, thoughts, reflections on these fields as well as giving some tools and techniques. I don't pretend that these will be original but I do hope that they will be able to translate some of these diverse ideas into coherent forms accessible to workers in the areas.